


Warehouse

by werpiper



Series: Winter Hill [1]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Prohibition Era, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, M/M, Off-screen Unknown Character Death, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25055842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/werpiper/pseuds/werpiper
Summary: The fateful meeting.  First in the action, although relatively late in the telling, of our Nwalin Prohibition AU.
Relationships: Dwalin/Nori (Tolkien)
Series: Winter Hill [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634950
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Warehouse

Nori was drunk, and sad in a remote and pleasant way, and the door opening was an insult. He set the bottle aside and touched his knives. Whoever it walked in as if they had a right to be there, quiet but moving with certainty. Burn them! Nori heard himself growl, and drew his pistol.

***

Dwarves do not love the water. They do not hear the sea calling them to immortality as do Elves; nor do they have any Mannish desire for conquest to drive them over the oceans. But when Men's oppressions threatened them in the old countries, they crossed the Atlantic as best they could, hoping for new lives in the New World.

The _Maker's Promise_ was as well-built a ship as any cobbled together in desperate times by desperate hands. It was wrecked off the coast of Massachusetts some six weeks later and found by a cod-fishing boat. Fourteen were on board, but there were no survivors. It appeared that most of them were starved and wounded before the ship had launched, and the wonder of it was that they had managed to build a ship at all, let alone set out upon the ocean. The Coast Guard sailors who boarded did not recognize the writing on the prow, nor the seven-starred flag that she flew. But one of them recognized in the small, battered corpses some distinctive physical characteristics of Dwarvish people, and after the wreck was brought into harbor by tugboat and settled, the captain requested a Dwarf be called in to read the ship's papers and tend to the dead.

"The worst part," said Balin late that night, with his family around him and his third glass of wine in his hands, "is that I can't find any of their family, anywhere in America. They were from Moria, sailed from Trieste -- I don't know how they got there, either -- and there's nothing, nobody here. They let me call Coast Guard offices all along the coast, and their people were searching telephone books with every variation of spelling and translation I could imagine. No one in New York, no one in Philadelphia, no one in Miami. They're sending telegrams to Saint John and Halifax, Cuba and Brazil, just to ask." His voice was deep with sorrow, and Dwalin put an arm around him.

"What are they going to do with...." Thorin's voice, normally so sure, trailed off into silence.

"I don't know," said Balin shortly. "There's some salvage payments due to the fishermen, and no doubt the Guard and cops will want a share. The bodies," his voice broke, and he took a hefty slug of wine before continuing, "were being transferred to the shul, and we'll return them to the stone tomorrow. Everything else is in a Coast Guard warehouse for now, and the _Maker's Promise_ is riding high and empty at a Coast Guard dock." Dwalin felt Balin's shoulders heave with a shudder. "Still seaworthy, from what they tell me."

Dwalin could hardly imagine it. Most of his own ocean-crossing had been spent tending others who were seasick, including everyone present with whom he'd fled -- Balin and Thorin and Dis; they hadn't met Farli yet, and of course the lads weren't born. He'd only kept his own stomach by refusing to eat anything that wasn't cram, and spending every possible minute at the edge of the deck with his eyes fixed firmly on the horizon. Balin was still talking, something about an auction, and whether Thrain could make a claim based on kingship if there were no closer kin to be found.

Another glass of wine, and somehow Fili and Kili persuaded Balin to come to bed with them -- a comfort, Dwalin thought, that he should sleep with the young, who had never known the horrors that had driven their people here. Farli and Dis retired soon after, leaving Dwalin and Thorin alone in the salon. Thorin had not been drinking -- he never did when he was sad, said it made it worse -- so Dwalin turned to him as a sober reference. "I shouldn't go to that warehouse tonight, right?" he asked.

Thorin almost smiled. "You've already decided to. I can tell."

"I don't like the idea of their stuff going to auction," said Dwalin. "Men pawing over it, turning people's things into money." He drained his cup, set it down on the low table. "I'll just go sit with, well, whatever they found. Maybe take a souvenir, if something speaks to my stone-sense. If they had any alcohol, I hope they drank it." He stood up and headed to the front door for his boots, but Thorin stopped him and made him go put on plain dark clothes before he left.

***

The footsteps stalked past rows and rows of crates, turning sharply into the open shelves where the salvage from the _Maker's Promise_ had been stacked. Nori cringed back. A thin moon shone through the warehouse's high windows, and the intruder was a hulking shadow among shadows, not tall for a Man but tremendously broad, bald head reflecting the pallid light. 

***

The Coast Guard's warehouse was only a block from Thorin's, and Dwalin knew the neighborhood well. The big surprise when he got there was that the front door wasn't locked. There was a perfectly good lock on it, but it swung open on silent hinges when he pushed the bar. He'd been inside exactly once before, to be personally intimidating after Balin had been professionally intimidating in court that day, over some perfectly legitimate imports that the Coast Guard had held up solely, it seemed, because they belonged to Dwarves. It was dark as a tomb, but Dwalin's stone-sense lit up like multicolored fire. There was a treasure here, a Dwarvish one, and he was fiercely glad he had come to it. He would take it, with the legendary pride of his people. If he could find its proper owner, he would give it to them freely and gladly and with with respect, in honor of the loss of their homelands and the irreplaceable dead.

***

Nori slid the tab, disabling the safety.

***

There was someone there among the shelves. Someone alive. Dwalin heard breathing, purposeful and steady, and a click of steel. His senses reeled at a firearm's reek of gunpowder and the bullet's lead. 

***

Nori fired.

***

It hit Dwalin in the chest like a kick, and he landed on his back. He'd been shot before, in the war, and he was furious that it should happen again, here in the supposedly-safer New World, among the sacred treasures of the dead. "Khazad ai-menu!" he roared, swarming to his feet. He wasn't armed, but it didn't matter. He leapt on his attacker like a storm at sea, Mahal's own revenge against desecration and loss.

***

The silencer worked like it was supposed to, and the bullet hit with a dull WHOCK. The intruder fell away as Nori swarmed up, ready to shoot again or flee -- but a shout filled his ears within moments, not English but Khuzdul, and whoever he'd shot rose from the dead like Jesus Christ and fell on him like a landslide. Ladies' little pea-shooter or not, it should have done _some_ damage, but then Nori had never even tried to shoot a Dwarf before -- anyway there he was, seized and lifted, shaken and pummeled and somebody screaming like thunder in his face. He dropped the gun; he cried out like a child -- "Mercy!"

***

A few blows landed before Dwalin realized several things in quick succession:

. He was hitting someone much smaller than himself.

. That person smelled, very strongly, of the kind of plum brandy that came only, at great expense, from the old countries.

. That person was begging for mercy.

Any of these, on its own, might have stopped him. But more vivid than any of them, he found that his stone-sense shuddered with every hurt he inflicted -- as if he were a child too young to use tools properly, breaking stones only to feel them give way beneath his strength, without knowledge or care for what he did. So like a child, learning, he set his strength aside.

***

Nori saw stars. Then he was in the air, flopping like a rag doll and screaming like a baby. He was an idiot, he was ridiculous, he was in pain -- and hadn't Dori warned him? When Malcom at the bar had told him they'd found a ghost ship, full of dead Dwarves, he'd been grieved and appalled, but Dori had said the dead wanted for nothing; they would wait with their Maker until the end of this world and the start of the Second Song, and Nori himself would be long dead and waiting with them then. The prophecy had seemed distant and empty, meaningless in the face of oppression and loss upon the pitiless sea. When Dori was finally asleep, Nori slipped out and went to Mal's workplace, where he'd delivered small beer to the Coast Guard's stevedores at lunch so many times -- funny how Men's militaries cared less than anyone for the laws of Men's own police. But wasn't he stupid, a stranger in a strange land after all, to flaunt those laws; wasn't it funny that he found the refugees' ceremonial stores of prohibited wines and drank them, religious sacrament officially allowed to his people, except for the breaking-in and stealing parts which were still inevitably illegal. It _hurt_ , as his lax body absorbed the blows and his mind (in his big brother's voice) reminded him of the wrong he had done.

***

Dwalin pulled his punch. His stone-sense was scintillating, pulsing in his awareness. There was treasure around him for sure -- rubies and emeralds cut with precision, mithril and gold poured out in love. But he held in one hand a greater treasure than any of that, Mahal's own handiwork alive and feeling, and he felt the pain he dealt as if he'd done it to himself. He opened his hand, one finger at a time unbending from the fist inside his knuckledusters. He touched the other's cheek and trembled.

***

It stopped.

Nori was set, swaying, back on his own feet. He would have fallen except for the hands -- huge as a Man's but stronger -- that held him, one on his shoulder and one on his face. Heavy fingers pushed into his beard, and lust -- what, of all the things, how drunk could he possibly be? -- flared in him, and he took a long, harsh breath.

The intruder stood at arm's length. His face was pale, bald head descending into dark hair and heavy beard, decorated with heavy scarring and tattoos. His eyes in the moonlight shone a pale blue like gas-flame, and Nori felt another surge of lust at that.

In the distance he heard running feet, and the sound of a police whistle.

***

Dwalin felt like he should apologize, or something -- anything -- but the gunner cut him off short. "Oh shit," and the voice was low and shivery, a bright thread running through it like a copper kettledrum, "it's the pigs."

The gunner seized Dwalin's hand and led the way -- not back to the entrance, where the door was rattling as someone tried, pointlessly, to unlock it -- but towards the back. There was a wide, ramped entrance where boats could dock directly, and Dwalin smelled the merciless salt of the sea as he was pulled past. "Up!" A window faced the alley, too low for moonlight. He let go of Dwalin's hand and gestured, and Dwalin nodded once and leapt. His fingers caught the sill and his knuckledusters broke the glass. Then he was up indeed, crouched in the small space he had shattered, the sea breeze blowing in. He reached back, and pulled the other up easily; then they were both through, dropping to the ground, and running away.

***

"Easy, big guy," said Nori. "Never run from the cops. It makes them want to chase you." So they slowed to a walk, just two good Dwarves out for a little night air. His attacker had to be a Dwarf, right? No Man took a bullet like that and got right up to pound you. Nori looked at him sideways. The stranger wore plain dark clothes and was maybe tall enough for a Man, but also maybe not quite -- and that was definitely a bullet-shaped hole in the front of his shirt, through which pale skin and dark fur could be seen. There was no blood, and Nori was, now that he thought of it, very glad and quite relieved to see. Also a relief, there were no police in sight. They strode away quietly side by side. Without discussing it, they turned together and went on north through Charlestown, and presuming they were both Dwarves indeed, it was no guess at all they were both heading back to Winter Hill.

*** 

Dwalin felt a fool. He'd gone in search of treasure, and hadn't Mahal taught him a lesson -- nothing the dead could leave, no jewels or carved stone or sacred texts or alcohol, could ever matter as much as a single precious life. He'd deserved that bullet for his presumption, and it was Mahal's good work and grace that he hadn't died of it. Mahal's grace again that he hadn't killed the poor soul who no doubt had only gone as Dwalin had done himself to pay witness and to mourn. "Will I see you at shul tomorrow?" he found himself asking, not that he'd had any plans to go there, although Balin would be happy if he did. "To sing for the lost," he added, as if there could possibly be any question, "when we give their bodies back to the stone."

The smaller Dwarf turned to face him. He had wide-set eyes and old-fashioned elaborate braids; in the moonlight he seemed to Dwalin to shine like beaten copper still. "No," he said at length, and smiled, sudden and sharp as a knife. "I don't think I want to see you there. How about we meet at Dougal's instead, and you can drink along with me, to their memories or this one?" He rattled off the address and a password, and dropped Dwalin's hand, crossing his arms in front of his thin chest while he waited for the answer.

"Of course," said Dwalin. He added his name, saw the other's eyes widen, then squint almost closed.

"Nori. At your service and your family's. See you Sunday night, then, at nine." And without waiting for further confirmation, he turned away between two buildings and was gone.

"Till then," Dwalin said aloud into the darkness. He walked back through the quiet streets alone, and behind him he heard a siren, and felt a ductile strength of copper spooling away into the night.


End file.
